About Me

Married for 44 years I have two grown-up daughters and two grandchildren. We live quietly in the SW of England where we tend our large garden and enjoy cooking with the produce. I love reading - and writing about what I read. Fav. books include crime, fantasy, sci fi, horror, YA, Victorian ghost stories, non-fiction such as travel books, essays, history and biographies.

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Tuesday, 31 March 2015

Books read in March

Yet another reading month has come and gone and here we are - a quarter of the way through the year already. March is quite a long month so I've managed eight books this month and yet again it's a pretty electic selection.

15. To a Mountain in Tibet - Colin Thubron. This blurb from Goodreads:

In his new book, Colin Thubron travels to Tibet, and takes the pilgrimage route to Kailas, the most sacred of the world's mountains, holy to one fifth of the earth's people, but rarely visited by westerners. Buddhists and Hindus have ritually circled the mountain for centuries, but its steepest slopes are sacrosanct and no one has ever climbed to the summit. Thubron made the expedition shortly after his mother's death, and his hike through a challenging terrain of rocks, lakes and remote monasteries is perhaps one of his most personal and poetic books to date.

Perhaps this isn't one of the author's best books, I don't know, but I never really felt completely involved in the story of his journey. Bits were interesting and informative but a lot of it felt repetitive and I struggled to finish it to be honest.

16. Insufficiently Welsh - Griff Rhys-Jones. The author is a very well known comedian and presenter of TV documentaries in Britain and *on* Britain. He was born in Cardiff but brought up in Essex and all his life has wondered if the Welsh people consider him to be 'insufficiently Welsh' to have a claim to his own nationality. Griff embarks on a journey around the various regions of Wales to see if this is so. Not only is the book a delightful travelogue for anyone wanting an introduction to Wales but the author's writing style is very readable and self-deprecating enough to be quite funny. Enjoyable but not one for the Welsh expert I suspect.

I said eclectic at the start of this post but there's a definite thread running through most of these books and that's cold weather, winter, mountains. No less than six have that connection and even the two that don't, Insufficiently Welsh and Tooth and Claw, have mountains somewhere in the book. I won't say it happened by accident because it didn't. I'm reading a lot about mountains at the moment and also enjoying books with a winter setting. Sometimes you just want to go with a theme and I find it's best to indulge yourself while it lasts.

Yet again I've read three non-fiction books this month. One was a bit average, one was good and one - Clear Waters Rising - was very good. So that's eight non-fiction books read so far this year. Very happy with that.

So, what was my favourite book this month? Well it was this one:

The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney. No contest really... well there was... I really enjoyed Sworn to Silence by Linda Castillo, Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton and Tess Gerritsen's 8th Rizzoli and Isles book, The Killing Place. But The Tenderness of Wolves had something extra: it was just brilliant and a worthy winner of my book of the month.

Next month I'm looking forward to continuing with Carl's Once Upon a Time IX reading challenge but other than that I'm not sure what I'll be reading. Possibly a couple of these off my tbr pile:

I also have a library pile of nine books at the moment, so I'd better crack on with those too. Whatever - I'm sure I'll find something...

7 comments:

Oh boy...you have me thinking on the Tenderness of Wolves now.. *sigh*I have the new book you sent me..2 other used ones recently obtained Two book from a girlfriend that I am waiting on and two other used books...My TBR is growing not dwindling!!!! argh!

when I finish The Alchemyst by Michael Scott I think I will read one of the newer ones because this will make 3 books for OUaT.

The Virgin of Small Plains was good. Read it several years ago. Glad you enjoyed the Linda Castillo book. I'm just finishing another Vicki Delany book set in British Columbia. It has talked about snow and ice the whole time. Cold and mountains and skiing. I'll have a review up in a few days. You had a good month!

A good selection of books, Cath! I really must read The Tenderness of Wolves soon - I've been thinking that for years! And I do fancy reading Insufficiently Welsh (as I'm part Welsh myself) and I liked his memoir Semi-Detached which I read a few years ago.

Your review of The Tenderness of Wolves has interested me. I like novels set in rural Canada (Have you read Mary Lawson? I highly recommend her) and I'm interested in Native Americans, too. I will read it.